Do Away with Safety Raffles

Safety Raffles have been around since someone with limited funds decided to give an award to employees who performed safely on the job.  From a purely promotional standpoint they did get a lot of attention, but from a motivational standpoint they did little to incent behavior change.  In fact, raffles often brought about negative feeling among the participants for a variety of reasons. When the item raffled was of a significantly higher value, these negative feelings were magnified.  Examples:

You often see company pickup trucks raffled to the winning safety participants on a construction site.  It is fun for the one who wins, not so much for the 588 who didn’t.  How about when a very large trucking company put the names of any driver who did not have an accident that year in a hat and the winner got $1 million in cash.  There were close to 20,000 names in that hat. Do you really think they got any behavior change for that expense?  Just recently United Airlines tried something about as foolish to distribute limited bonus dollars to handful of employees via a lottery.  The HR dept. was pilloried because of it.

Safety raffle programs are used because the company doesn’t have the budget to implement an effective safety award system.  But it’s counter-productive. It gets no results and wastes the money anyway.  Our advice when you are considering any kind of raffle to motivate safe behavior is save your money.  All it really just becomes is an expensive safety communications tool.

The most successful behavior based safety programs recognize employees every time they perform in a safe manner.  Until now, there were no safety award systems that could provide this type of performance recognition and do it within normal budget parameters. 

The On the Spot award card has changed that.  It allows you to issue award cards for safety performance with low or no cost per card and still have a highly motivational program.

By offering a safety award system that uses a combination of winning cards redeemable for the most popular gift cards, and non-winning cards that help to reinforce behavior, you can do away with traditional sweepstakes or raffles that do little to change behavior.  How you combine these two cards depends solely on your budget requirements. 

For more information on AwardSafety products or services or other white papers please contact us at awardsafetyinfo@cox.net